Yeah i remembered that aswell...wasn't really awake when this happened (thats why i wanted to revert it in the first place)
I now riced everything back to what i wanted, so i don't really need to revert anything.
But i need to have my snapshots working again. Those saved my butt more than a dozen times already and i need the peace of mind that i can revert to a working system at any point
I also have this issue on 2 of 3 machines I tested it on, one of which I installed the OS (KDE-Lite) only 4 days ago. (it was an immediate issue) Let me know if want any info from me to compare, if that's helpful, such as garuda-inxi, grub configs, etc.
It's not a specific snapshot that doesn't work. It's all snapshots, regardless of how old or new, that don't work.
So as of right now, i cannot use the snapshot functionality and cannot rely on my system backups. So if i were to brick my installation right now, my system would be lost and i could not restore any snapshot.
I didn't try "booting" into a snapshot from commandline because i don't know how. You said i should RESTORE a snapshot from TTY and that is something i don't want to do right now as my installation is working right now and i don't want to brick it by restoring snapshots that don't work.
To summarize:
My installation works fine, i can boot it, i can use it, 100% works. But if i go into the Snapshot section in grub when booting, and trying to boot in ANY of the snapshots (even ones i made just seconds ago on my working system) i get the "bailing out bcs sbin/init missing" error.
I can then easily reboot into my system and use the current installation, but i don't have access to ANY of my snapshots, making the backup / snapshot system broken right now.
That stresses me out because i need to have a working snapshot system in the case i break my installation at some point...
until this is fixed, back up your installed packages via comm -23 <(pacman -Qqett | sort) <(pacman -Qqgg base-devel | sort | uniq)
This will not save an installation but at least allows you to go back to a similar state. I suggest making regular non-btrfs backups of your home directory too.
I am doing regular back-in-time snapshots of my home directory and i am also doing lists of all my installed packages.
Maybe i try what @bluepower said, which is basically the same as @BluishHumility (both are blue, coincidence? ) and just restore one of those snapshots from my working system and see if it fixes it...
yeah alright, so restoring a snapshot from my working system DOES indeed work and does NOT brick my boot lol
So that means i have 95% working snapshots, that will save me in any case that allows me to still access my system. If i break that however...i cannot access this...
I assume i would still be able to boot into a live-usb of garuda and chroot into my install maybe? And restore the snapshot from there? But that is certainly a much more in-depth process than simply chosing the last working snapshot in grub.
@bluepower - sadly restoring a snapshot did not repair the grub-functionality
Yes, you can always restore a snapshot from the live system. That would be sort of the "original" way to restore a snapshot. The method is described here: Snapper - ArchWiki
It obviously more clunky than the grub-btrfs system where you just choose a snapshot from a menu and it's done, but it is a good backup plan. You can also use Btrfs Assistant from the live environment.
Regarding the actual issue, I cannot figure out how to reproduce this issue. The /boot/grub/grub-btrfs.cfg posted above does not contain any obvious clues to me, all those snapshots look pretty much normal.
This seems especially odd to me:
I brought up a fresh KDE lite installation yesterday, and booting to snapshots is working out of the box. I even have non-standard root subvolumes set up and Grub still automatically finds the snapshots and booting to them works fine.
Now that I think of it, I guess I did reinstall Grub and regenerate the configuration file on the back of changing the default subvolumes. It seems like a long shot, but have you tried doing that yet?
That was not me I didn't install KDE lite 4 days ago.
sudo grub-install --no-nvram
Gives me the following error:
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: error: install device isn't specified.
Updating grub said it found 28 snapshots, memtext86+ and my linux images and fallback...But this problem persists beyond a kernel update that i made via garuda-update that then did an grub-update aswell...
That didn't fix it either. But i stumbled across something that may or may not be relevant...
doing snapper list showed me no snapshots after my deletion-oddesey was done. But grub-update said it found two snapshots... It said N/A for both the name and description. The snapper gui doesn't show those two aswell but the grub menu when booting does show those two.... But grub-update did find them and said it put those into the menu....maybe those two contain the borked sbin/init file ?
How could i go about deleting those two if even snapper itself doesn't find them